In many ways, the job search process after a PhD can be even more stressful than after undergrad. Most people do a PhD because they are genuinely interested in something, or at least interested enough to dedicate 4-7 years diving deep into one specific aspect of it. After this process though, you’ve typically dove so deep into some obscure topic that it is pretty easy to lose sight of what’s going on more broadly. There are many ways to mitigate this of course: you can talk to people researching in other fields, you can engage with industry via internships, etc…but it’s still a classic occupational hazard. The result often is that once you start thinking about finishing, you realize that your skillset is so specific that there are only a few things you can do with it. There is also sometimes a bit more pressure both financially and egotistically. You’ve spent so much time in school now that you really do need some cash to keep yourself afloat. You also feel like having expended so much effort on your education, you gotta have a shiny job to show for it.

A PhD is ultimately a course of training for you to become an independent researcher. As a result, it is often framed as a gateway to academic positions, such as post-docs, professorships, and so on. However, training as a researcher does help you in a number of other ways. Any research project begins with convincing people why it generally matters. Ultimately, you gotta convince your advisor it’s worth their time to support, your collaborators to help you, and funding sources to throw money at you. Then you need to build an understanding of how other people have thought about similar problems before and convince yourself and others that you have something new to contribute. Finally, once you’ve gone off and done your thing, you need to convince the broader community that you’ve done something worthwhile: What have you done that previous researchers didn’t? What does this enable more broadly in the future? What are the key things you learned that others can take away for other similar work? Beyond the various technical skills that you of course build up when doing research, I’m convinced that this training in communication and persuasion is of potentially even greater value as it translates well into almost anything you might want to do in the future. Even in industry, starting new projects within a company or even starting a new company from scratch will require you to ask very similar questions and convince people to believe in both your initial vision and your attempts to bring that vision to reality.

The first thing to decide was whether I wanted to go the academic route and apply for postdoc/faculty positions or go to industry. Honestly, academia seemed pretty appealing at first. Life as an academic appeared to be some combination of generating and working on research ideas yourself, training younger researchers to build upon and extend your ideas and grow into researchers themselves, communicating fundamental ideas about your field to a broader audience by teaching classes, and fundraising to maintain your ability to do your research and hire students to help get things done. In many ways, life as a young professor sounded like having a small startup company within a larger entity (the university) since you have the license to mostly work on whatever you want, but the onus is still on you to make sure you have the funds to keep yourself afloat. Continuing to think like a researcher and mentoring/teaching younger researchers was appealing, but the constant pressure to acquire funding and the possibility of continuing to disconnect from practical problems did concern me. Different people will of course navigate these tradeoffs differently, but for me this made industry the more appealing route.

Now that I was pretty set on industry, the second thing to decide was what I wanted out of an industry job. At a high-level, at least in computer science, jobs in industry tend to come in one of two flavors. There are industry research jobs, where the primary mandate is to continue to publish original research. These are primarily available in larger companies that have the funds and freedom to explore many directions that may not pan out in the hopes that some of the research they fund will be relevant to future products. Another core motivation is simply improving brand recognition: Google improves its appeal by generating top tier research or hiring well known researchers, even if their work doesn’t ultimately contribute directly to Google’s products. The bulk of available jobs were of the second flavor: applied work focused on building a product. These jobs are often also quite appealing to researchers, since many products these days are of sufficient complexity that they require application and development of fundamentally new ideas to make them work. Industry research jobs felt like the perfect middle ground between academia and these traditional product focused roles: you can get (almost) the same freedom as academia to work on whatever you want, significantly higher pay, and none of the stress of acquiring tenure or the funds to continue your work. Still, I was also hoping for somewhat of a change. I continued to be concerned that my work had no immediate value, and I was not sure whether industrial research work would be sufficiently motivating if my main job would be continuing to publish papers that may only have a longer term impact. I never resolved this uncertainty before my job search began, and just ended up punting on this issue to see whether talking to people in various companies directly would help me figure it out.